If you ask shareholders, Spotify is doing great right now. Ask anyone else, and you’ll find a mess of scams, insensitive CEO messages, and lawsuits. One of the strangest scams to come to light recently involves (what else) AI-generated content.
Here’s the crux of the matter: Cover versions of popular songs were inserted into large, publicly accessible playlists and hidden among dozens of other covers by real artists, all the while reaching millions of listeners and making money in the process.
The artists who “perform” the cover songs – the Highway Outlaws, Waterfront Wranglers, Saltwater Saddles – all fit a certain pattern: They have hundreds of thousands of listeners per month, zero social media presence and some very ChatGPT-sounding bios. A group of Reddit citizens first spotted the pattern in bands covering country classics, but a broader look showed that there were groups covering songs from different decades and genres. None of the bands had originals, but a group might cover the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Third Eye Blind and then switch to “Linger” by the Cranberries on the same record. If you didn’t think the song was by KI, you probably wouldn’t suspect anything.
“Apparently this has been going on for several years, with ambient music, electronic music, and jazz,” said calibuildr, the Redditor who posted the first thread on r/countrymusic and asked to be identified by his username. “I think the new thing here is that now that AI is a consumer product, anyone can do something with vocals.”
A lawyer for 11A, the label claiming to work with the artists involved in the thread, said their client is properly paying royalties and has documents proving human musicians’ involvement. He did not respond to further requests for comment and did not share contact information for the label, whose only trace is an expired domain and this Facebook profile with 117 followers and last post in 2021 – which doesn’t exactly match the numbers its artists are pulling in online.
Regardless, this whole situation sheds light on the murky discussion about what to do with this kind of scam in the first place. Who should be the one to remove these songs? This time, it wasn’t Spotify.
“Spotify has no policy against artists who create content using autotune or AI tools, as long as the content does not violate our other policies, including our misleading content policy, which prohibits impersonation,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “In this case, the content was removed by the content providers.”
Virtually anyone on the artist side could be a “content provider” – the “bands” themselves, their management, the label – but Henderson Cole, an entertainment and music industry lawyer, suspects they could be third-party intermediaries that many artists use to upload and manage their music on streaming platforms.
“I think whoever is actually spreading this might be nervous about the reports about it and might have already removed it,” he said. “People are finding better ways to exploit the streaming system because technically this isn’t streaming fraud. If they pay someone to play cover songs and then use covers to prevent streams, that’s not illegal, it’s just exploitative.”
Figuring out who exactly is being exploited here is another dilemma. (Hint: It’s always the artist.) According to Cole, Spotify distributes royalties from a pool of money. So if Post Malone received 1 percent of all streams on Spotify this month, he (and his record label) would be entitled to 1 percent of that month’s royalties.
This amount would then be split between the people involved in the creation of his songs. For a cover song, this would include a share for the person being covered – but streaming services offer a larger share to the new performers of the song and their label than to the original artist.
“A lot of people don’t know this, but the government sets the royalties and then these streaming companies negotiate with the labels, distributors, artists, songwriters and everybody based on those royalties,” he said. “So the songwriters might get some money, but probably not as much as they’d like, and I’m sure they’re not thrilled about these crazy AI performances of their songs being out there.”
So, okay, maybe the government can step in and fix this?
“I don’t know how you legislate all of this,” said Rick Beato, a musician, producer and YouTuber who testified before a congressional committee about the intersection of AI and music in terms of intellectual property, transparency and copyright. “As I sat there in that meeting, I realized it was impossible to get consensus here.”
Rather, Beato believes Spotify itself is already in the game, adding both real and AI songs to playlists and collecting listeners to keep a larger percentage of royalties for itself, thus maximizing its profits.
“So there would be a real incentive for Spotify to monitor that against third parties because they want to be the ones doing it,” Beato said, echoing a version of the theory put forward since 2017 that “Spotify was an inside job.”
However, the best way to support your favorite artist is to buy merchandise and see them live. AI can’t fake that quite still.
